Black Rust (4 page)

As the Mercedes was rolling to a stop, I swung my door open and jumped out.  I adjusted Lutz’s rifle at my shoulder and took a peek through the night vision scope for a glimpse into the building’s lobby. 

Nothing moving. 

I leaned back into the car and laid a hand on my rifle, which was pointed at the floorboard and leaning on my side of the console.  “Use it if you need it.  Don’t muck up my gun.  Call your buddy.  I’ll be right back down.”

I stepped away from the Mercedes and scanned across the sky, once without the night vision scope, once with.  It was always possible the drone was up there, and I hadn’t seen the flashing LEDs.  Too far away.  Too dim.  Burned out.  Disabled intentionally.  Anything was possible.

God, I hate that phrase.

It’s damned disempowering when trying to formulate plans to save your ass from a work camp.

I ran up the stairs in front of the building, crossed under a pretentious portico, and jogged through a metal framework that a decade or two ago had held panels of glass to separate the building’s air-conditioned lobby from the humid mosquito soup outside.  I paused and used the night vision scope to scan what I could see of the first floor, looking for dangers and looking for a stairway door.  It wasn’t uncommon to find individuals or clans of d-gens in these old buildings.  I guess they liked having a place to call home just as much as a normal person did.

The thing with the d-gens this far outside the city was that you never knew if they were going to be hostile or not, territorial or not, deadly or not.  The ones who filled the rotting suburbs and fed from the troughs tended to be predictable.

Maybe a regular meal schedule makes mammals lazy.

I spotted a door hanging from a rusted hinge and saw through the gap.

I hurried across the lobby and stopped outside the door to peek inside the stairwell.  It wouldn’t do any good to surprise any d-gens bedding down there.  Startled animals don’t always run away. 

Seeing nothing at the bottom of the stairs, I went in and started to climb.

The stairs were fairly clear, which told me I was on the right path.  The stairwell had probably been used by the maintenance personnel when they came out to repair the charging station on the roof.

Sneaking and stepping, quiet in the dark, I made my way from floor to floor, around a landing and back up again, thinking about the problem, thinking through the solution—get the memory cards from the three drones, disconnect their backup batteries so the locator transponders wouldn’t function.  Maybe dispose of the remains in a pond somewhere and get back to Houston to spin up a good lie to fit whatever facts had found their way back to the bureaucracy.

So many of life’s speed bumps could be smoothed over with a well-told lie.

I just needed to get that last drone.

At the top of the stairs, I found a hollow steel door with a chain running through a hole big enough to stick an arm through.  The chain looped back through the stair’s handrail.  A padlock held the chain together and kept the door mostly closed, but closed enough to keep me from squeezing through the gap.

Crap.

The maintenance people must have had trouble with d-gens sneaking up onto the roof and messing with their equipment.

I looked at the lock and chain for a moment, mentally inventorying my equipment, wondering if anything on my person could break the lock or chain.

Shit.  Nothing.

Shoot the lock?  No.  That only worked in old movies.

Did Lutz have something in the car?  Probably.  How quickly could I run down five floors and get all the way back up? 

I looked at the door again.  It was in sad shape and banged all to hell.  The paint had long since flaked away, leaving only layers of rust.  The chain and lock, though, were in good shape.  I’d not be breaking those without tools.

But the door—

The rusty hinges had to be in worse shape than the surface. 

Why not give it a go?

I took two steps back to the edge of the landing and threw myself at the door. 

I’d surely have a bruise wrapped over a sore shoulder in the morning, but I felt the door give.  I guessed at least one of the old hinges had bent.  I stepped back and slammed the door with my shoulder a second time.

The top hinge broke away, and the door leaned out.

I slammed into the door a third time, and the middle hinge broke away, leaving the door hanging on the chain and one hinge.

I climbed through, got a foot hung up, and tripped as I tumbled out onto the roof.

Getting quickly to my feet and panting from the exertion, I looked around and saw old cell phone antenna clusters standing up on three sides of the building’s roof.  A much newer construction stood at the roof’s center, a cylindrical metal framework twelve feet tall with two layers of docking stations running around the circumference, with one layer for the large spotter drones at about shoulder height.  The ring above that was made up of smaller docking ports for private video drones, and those operated by corporate farms and work camps in the area. 

Jogging over to the charging cylinder, I circled it, seeing two big white spotter drones, dormant and charging.  Neither of those concerned me—the only spotter drone that contained video of my crime was sitting in the trees fifteen miles west.

No other drones were docked.

Good?  Bad?

Hell, how was I to know? 

I ran to the edge of the roof and looked east in the direction of the city, and I scanned the sky.

Where’s that damn drone?

“All I’m sayin’ is the last video image transmitted by my spotter drone shows your golden boy Christian aiming his rifle at it.  Then I lost the signal.”  Ricardo was not happy.

Lutz couldn’t gauge whether Ricardo was angry enough to do something vindictive.  “Are you recording this?”

“If I was, would I tell you or would I lie about it?  It’s a stupid question, Lutz.”

Lutz tried a half-truth.  “We saw your drone go down.”

“Shot down,” Ricardo clarified, “by that new guy you run with.  You know how much drones cost these days?  Parts aren’t easy to come by, and I’ve got to pay for it out of my pocket because you morons will be in a work camp.”

“What?” Lutz took offense.  “After all the business we’ve done.  You’re gonna throw me to the cops over one goddamned drone?”

“The low-res signal went straight through to the clearinghouse.”  Ricardo paused, adding a bit more clarity.  “The police have it.”

“You cheese-brained asshole!” Lutz yelled into his phone, no longer caring if he was being recorded.  “What do I pay you for?”

“You pay me to send you the coordinates of the good kills before I send them to the clearinghouse so you and your partner can get there before anybody else.  And I did that.  I always do my part.”

“No,” Lutz snarled.  “I pay you a premium price to not only send me the coordinates but to delay the return video feed so you can make sure nothing incriminating ever gets through to the police.  I pay you that because I don’t want to get fined and I sure as hell don’t want to go to a work camp.  If all I wanted was to front-run kill coordinates I could pay any dumbass spotter for that.”

“You watch your tone, Lutz.”  Ricardo’s voice turned acid.  “I can give the police a lot more than they have right now.”  He paused, giving Lutz a chance to understand the threat.  “You could wait for approved sanctions like everybody else but because I front-run the sanctions to you, you get them before they finalize.  You know you can’t pull the trigger until you have an ID on an approved sanction.  Everybody knows that.  This sanction got cancelled.  I never sent the ID through the spotter drone to you guys.  How the hell was I supposed to know you were going to go in there and kill the whole herd anyway?”

Lutz wasn’t listening now so much as thinking through the implications of what Ricardo had already told him.  “Did all that video go out?  Do the police have everything?”

“They have the low-res feed from my drone,” answered Ricardo.

“Why didn’t you intercept?” Lutz was thinking this would rile Christian up and push maybe push him to murder.  Then it was down to Old Mexico for blue water and cheap whores.  Who cared about the stories he’d heard about the cartels?  Lutz knew how to take care of himself. 

“I didn’t intercept because I didn’t think you morons were going to kill them.  I thought you were done for the evening.  I have other guys out there, Lutz.  You’re not the only one who pays for the services I provide.”

“You screwed us,” said Lutz with a lethal edge in his tone.  “I can run.  You know that.  But I don’t know what Christian will do.  He did all that work for those cartels down in Mexico.  You’ve heard the stories.  He’s a wicked bastard.”

The phone went silent.  Ricardo drew an audible breath, but still sounded confident when he said, “I didn’t know you guys were going to go through with it, that’s why I stopped monitoring your feed.  I was trying to find you another job while you were all the way out there.  Do you know where my spotter drone is?”

“We can find it,” said Lutz.

“Look, if you can bring me the drone, maybe I can fix this.  I’ve got a video guy, we used him on that thing last year.”

Lutz knew exactly which thing Ricardo was referring to—that thing was the reason Lutz had suddenly found himself without a partner and had to team up with Christian.  That problem had been expensive to get out of.  “You better make me a good price.”

“Just bring in the drone.  Do it quick.  If we get the video altered and out to the cops before they get into the office in the morning, nobody will ask any questions.  The low-res will look incriminating, but we can alter the high-res to make you look innocent.”

“Will it be good enough to get the kill sanction retroactively reinstated?”

“For enough money, my guys can give you a video of Joseph Stalin humping Mother Teresa.”

Lutz ignored the attempt at humor.  He was too stressed for the silliness.  “There were two video drones on the scene.”

“That’s shitty luck,” said Ricardo.  “Might be there’s nothing I can do.”

“We’re working on that problem.”

“What does that mean?” asked Ricardo.

“One of those drones is down in the woods.  We’ll have the other one in a minute.”

“How do you know they didn’t already upload their videos?”

“We don’t,” Lutz told him.  “You need to find that out for us, you understand?”

“That’s not what I do.”

“You’re doing it this time,” Lutz commanded.  “I’m not going to get screwed on this.  We’ll be at your place in a few hours.” 

Before seeing anything, I heard the familiar whispery buzz of a drone’s spinning rotors.

I looked away from my view of Houston ten or fifteen miles to the east and ran back to the charging tower.  Just as I was rounding the structure, looking in the sky for the drone I expected to see there, I saw it maneuvering to line up with the dock.

Surprised into action, I smacked the drone with the barrel of Lutz’s rifle, sending it colliding into the charging station’s framework.  The drone bounced away and hit the roof, throwing up small stones where the spinning rotors ran through loose gravel.  It rose back into the air as I reached out and grabbed one of its rotor arms.  I spun it around and smashed it into the tower’s frame.

Two of the drone’s rotors stopped instantly.  Pieces of plastic flew.  I smashed the drone twice more into the framework before throwing it to the ground and stomping it. 

It was dead.  I hoped.

The cameras were busted off.  The rotors had come away.  The rotor arms were cracked or separated.  The drone’s electronic innards were exposed.

Breathing heavy from the brief fight, I dropped to a knee beside the carcass and dug through, looking for the memory card and the wires to disconnect the transponder from the backup battery.

Having run down the dark stairwell, out through the lobby, and back to Lutz’s Mercedes, I opened the rear door and tossed the expensive piece of drone junk into the back.

“What the hell?” Lutz looked over his shoulder, frowning.  “Get that outta my car.  That’s evidence.”

“Can’t leave it here.”  I hurried around to the passenger side door, unclipped Lutz’s rifle from my harness and passed it across as I got into the seat. 

“Why not?”

“Don’t be stupid.”  I thumbed to the highway.  “Let’s get going.  We can ditch it in a pond or river.  Hell, somewhere in the woods.  Anywhere except at a charging station where it’ll be spotted by the next drone coming to the dock.”

Lutz put the Mercedes into gear and turned in a big loop over the rough asphalt, heading back toward the highway entrance ramp.  “I talked with Ricardo.”

About time you gave me his name.  “Ricardo’s your spotter?”

“One of ‘em.”

“It was his drone we shot down?”

“
You
shot down,” Lutz snapped.

“Grow up.”  It didn’t matter that I shot the drone down.  Lutz’s trigger-happy fuckup had sparked this fiasco.  “Let’s just fix it, okay?  We can point fingers later.”

Lutz bounced the Mercedes over a curb to get onto the frontage road that ran along beside the highway.  “Ricardo wants his drone back.”

“Maybe we can sell him the other two for parts.  Did he say whether any of the video got through?”

“The low-res.” 

The low-resolution version.

“Incriminating?” That was the answer I wanted most of all.  Was I on the hook?  Was there video evidence enough to put me in a work camp?

“He’s got you aiming the rifle at the spotter drone.”

“But he didn’t forward that part of the video, right?  I mean, that’s your deal with him, right?  He intercepts the video and edits out any incriminating snippets before the police see, right?”

“Supposed to be the deal.”

I glared at Lutz.  I didn’t like where this was going.

“He didn’t intercept anything.  The sanction was never approved so he ignored our feed and surfed porn or something.  The cops have all the low-res video—the whole feed until you shot down the spotter.”

Lutz’s dumbass move to start shooting before we had a confirmed sanction was bad.  Now his buddy’s failure to hold up his end of the bargain had just made it a lot worse.  Life was hard enough, trying to straighten it out past my own mistakes, but the weight of other peoples’ catastrophes was getting hard to bear.